Health: Walkit for exercise

Walkit is a website that promotes the power of walking as a healthy way to get around urban areas. The UK-based site helps people make more informed decisions about whether travel by foot is a viable choice in particular situations. So far, the site has walking routes for London, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Newcastle/Gateshead, and plans to cover all the UK's big towns by the end of this year. Plans are afoot to add US cities soon, with Boston projected as the port of entry. A user enters starting location and desired destination just as it would be done to return driving instructions at a site like Yahoo! Maps, along with such refinements as the route that is the most direct route or the least busy; there's an option to request a route that passes through another location on the way; and thanks to a feature just added, users going through inner London can request the trail with the lowest amount of pollution. Walkit returns a detailed map and written directions, plus travel time, calories burned, and carbon dioxide avoided by choosing walking over riding in a car, taxi or bus. <http://www.walkit.com/>